Daniel Wallwork’s stick in the mud (from the mangrove pods series) (2017) have evocatively rusty bases, suggesting the rooted areas where they may have entered the sand. They entertain us with their fictional natural antecedents, and speak to a future where science may morph nature and machine. Wallwork remembers, “I have always loved the mangrove seed form and as an active 10-year-old, fishing in the Cairns inlet with my grandfather, I would watch these almost sci-fi, space rocket, torpedo forms floating past en masse for hours. Small clusters would be stuck in the mud, growing way out, on a salty tidal mud flat. They are formed perfectly to survive.” Wallwork has always envisaged these mangroves as large, “taking root on a foreshore somewhere with public walking through and around them”. –